Gadgetory

the Phoenix made a name for itself at The Prodigy small form-factor case a few years ago and has been trying to recreate that success ever since the BitFenix shinobi was the company's semi recent attempt at a mid tower enclosure and now they're going after what the company calls quote the super mid tower market with the BitFenix Shogun the Shogun is what we're reviewing today this is a $160 case that mixes aluminum glass and steel for its monolithic stature and stone-dead visits on the front panel and before getting to the review this video is brought to you by raw fury proprietors of fantastic indie PC games like Kingdom a game that we reviewed and liked some time ago and the new hell em up game tormentor ex Punisher where everyone has just one HP check the link in the description below for more information the Phoenix's Shogun is the company's new flagship and mixes a semi custom approach to functionality which we'll go through in this case and the expected residence of RGB LED is located in a few places throughout the chassis the materials use the top panel somewhat resembles the prodigy case and it's got a 2 millimeter thick sheet of aluminum and then the bottom is also a 2 millimeter thick aluminum it helps elevate the case and then it goes all the way under the case so you're protected from some of the dust in theory and then further the internal materials are standard it's steel and plastic and the steel for the chassis the motherboard tray is about one millimeter thick which is denser than a lot of the cases that are in the sub $100 mark this is a bit more than that anyway but those tend to be somewhere in the 0.6 to 0.8 millimeter thick steel just for frame of reference the panel in use is a little bit stylized it's sort of a parallelogram for the glass side panel the other glass side panel is blacked out and it's not just tinted black it's if you take the fin off and look at the back of it it's just black as in literally impossible to see through it so interesting choice on BitFenix as part for the glass side panels if you look carefully at the front it looks like their support for a five and a quarter inch optical drive but that's not the case it's entirely a cosmetic move other cosmetic items are mostly relegated to things that that also serve a functional purpose in this case like better for thought put into cable management with thanks to modular drive cages an optional EA TX extended motherboard tray shield and an optional quasi shroud for the PSU this part is among the more interesting items the shroud only covers the window side and does not cover the top side of the PSU embedded within it's more industrial exterior are two two and a half inch compartments each outfitted with RGB LEDs that are for once actually sort of unique the LEDs can be relocated to light the SSDs horizontally or vertically or it can be removed entirely we like that BitFenix has realized alongside NZXT that SSDs are a major blame points going forward and granted the 2.5 inch form factor will eventually fade some of these drives do look cool enough to show off we do think that the LEDs aligning the SSD cage are disappointing overall but the Phoenix has the right idea the lights would be better executed had BitFenix opted for a thin diffuser to spread the light better rather than the hard brightness of just the LED bulb shining through a stronger LED may have also helped in this regard but the rest of the cases LEDs are controllable through the built-in dummy controller that grants seven colors or an RGB cycle along with a simple off setting you can connect your own controller if you prefer door plug-in to ACS aura which seems to be getting some dominance among the smaller case manufacturers these days including in win with their rog certification or so they call it this mix of modular components is the overall theme for the Shogun the hard drive cages are all removable except for one which is the bottom set of cages behind the shroud and that bottom set gives you a permanent two three and a half inch drive support and then the top cage is you've got two of them each one can be removed or left in in addition to those as you'll see there are holes riddling the motherboard tray each of those holes can be used to relocate the cages or video card supports which are largely not necessary I mean they're just they're totally unnecessary unless you have an exceptionally heavy video card like one of the over kills of attack cards that came out for the 1080s for the most part you won't need those but if you have a card and sag is a concern you could throw the video card mounts in there the power supply shroud is also removable and could taken out completely if you wanted to relocate the SSDs elsewhere as is the optional EA T X extender which is mostly used to conceal cabling on the backside of the case when looking through or to add extra pass throughs for EA 2 X motherboards concealing the cabling is further assisted by the blackout tempered glass right side panel and shows that BitFenix grasp so what a few other manufacturers don't that tempered glass on the right side generally means the user has to work harder to keep those cables clean and then looking back for a moment at those video cards support structures you'll notice that there's foam on the top side which is just to protect the video card and it's faceplate there's also foam facing the side panel we were curious about this and asked BitFenix why that foam was there the one facing outward and they just said it was for looks so can't really argue with that it does seem unnecessary but again for looks what are you gonna say as for the stock cooling configuration the fan comes with two 120 millimeter fans mounted in front that be sort of front center and front bottom and that configuration means that all of the air is for the most part being directed at the GPU rather than the CPU there's no straight across from the CPU fan it's all straight across from the GPU or over the GP in the backplate a third and final fan is located in the back and that's your standard 120 millimeter rear exhaust oriented directly across from our CPU tower cooler if you saw this case listing previously or have seen other reviews you've likely seen and heard that the front reportedly supports three 120 millimeter fans however in working with the case that's not true it does support three 140 millimeter fans in the front you'd of course have to swap the other 120 s out for that and we tested one alternative configuration when adding a single 140 millimeter fans at the top of the front panel which directs air straight at the CPU we notified BitFenix about this 3 120 millimeter alleged support and they confirmed that it officially supports two 120 millimeter front fans and then corrected the site listing and for the normal testing methodology as always the link in the description below has the full article for this case where patrick Lathan has the complete review and walkthrough of everything but we also have a testing methodology defined where we talk about things like what does delta T mean if that confuses you or if you're not sure why idle can be below ambient because it's not it's a delta T value check the article it is defined there and walks you through how all of the testing works and what Delta values are and how we obtain them and how we use thermocouple readers to actively monitor ambient internal case ambient stuff like that let's start with the GPU thermals in our test the intake fans kept the GPU well supplied with cool air for a respectable temperature of just under 52 Salus delta T but this cool air continued flowing out the back of the case without ever touching the CPU comparatively the corsair 270 r and the NZXT s340 elites are just behind this in performance moving to CPU temperature is with the case fans at their maximum at 1260 rpm and the CPU is shown running at 60 1.74 degrees Celsius above ambient this isn't especially impressive but is unsurprising given the size and speed of the fans alongside their location with the hard drive cage is installed you're also redirecting a lot of that airflow again towards the GPU this puts the Shogun right behind the n1 303 when we've added fans to it so that's not the stock configuration that's with aftermarket fans but below the toasty 60 6.18 Celsius DT that our previously reviewed pure base 600 managed adding a Corsair 140 millimeter fans the front intake array drove CPU temperatures down to 50 5.7 delta T and that's Celsius of course landing it ahead of the st 40 elite the Cullinan and behind the Corsair cases this is because that 140 millimeter fan again drives air straight across the CPU it's never going anywhere else and creates somewhat of a tunnel of airflow into the cooler and out of the tower moving on to noise testing we see the stock Shogun with its three 120 millimeter fans performing right around where the Corsair 570 X sits when the 570 X has its three 120 millimeter fans configured to 1050 rpm at the quieter speed of 1000 rpm for the Shogun the BitFenix case measures @ 32.6 DBA when containing our standardized test bench and of course the internal components like the GPU and the CBF n matter a lot more here the phoenixes Shogun that feels appropriately priced to likely be quiet pure bass 600 that we just reviewed earlier this week the Shogun includes it several semi modular and fully modular features useful for tuning the case specifically to your needs it granted this also means that you're paying more and receiving more Hardware as a results so if the modular Bay is the PSU shroud and the VGA holders aren't interesting to you you're going to be shelling out the money anyway for those unused parts at $160 this is one of the better cases we've looked at recently it has a few shortcomings one would be probably want to change the cooling configuration a little bit which isn't that hard to do and can be done for fairly cheap but it does offset your cost if you're planning to buy another fan still one $60 baseline puts this around where the Corsair 5 70 X the mastercase pro 5 would land and some of the inland lineup just in terms of the aluminum amalgam I guess and when kind of does that for their thing so if you like aluminum or if you like aluminum and steel in the case of this one look into things like in when Leon Lee but otherwise the corsair 570 acts the Coolermaster mastercase pro is quite a bit different from this but same price category and some of those cases might be worth looking into other than this overall the build quality is high the quality of material is pretty high there's a downside in the installation process in the factory where they've actually torqued the hell out of the screws so that is a problem we've seen with some other cases coming out of the same factories or even just cases in general from NZXT they've had that problem for a long time where the thumb screws for some of the mounting hardware that's modular in here get torqued so much so there's actually physical cosmetic only damage to those components cosmetic only doesn't really matter a whole lot at the end of the day but it's a small thing that it could be improved upon and certainly doesn't that doesn't need to be that much abuse to the hardware LEDs the LEDs are not that impressive so if that matters to you maybe look at alternatives because there are plenty of other cases with better LEDs maybe the best approach would be to add LEDs to this case they're actually a bit Phoenix didn't send us an LED controller which would be a separate purchase that we haven't played around with yet but I guess you could throw one of theirs in there if you didn't want to go for something like you plus or the SP RGB fans LEDs overall stock though aren't that impressive but they have the right idea of allowance and modularity so that's that's pretty much it for the BitFenix Shogun if you're interested in this case as always we'll have a link to it in the description below and then of course the full review the written article is there along with testing methodology go to patreon.com/scishow store video subscribe for more thanks for watching I'll see you all next time or if you like aluminum and steel in the case of this